News of the weird

Via “masgramondou”, comes a mindblowing story. Sure, it’s VICE, so full of SJW virtue signaling and hand-wringing. But in a nutshell: there are lawyers for illegal immigrants who are actively trying to get their clients incarcerated at Riker’s Island in order to avoid deportation.

Let that sink in. They would rather sit in jail in the USA than be free outside the USA. Only in America, folks.

Having lived in Europe for basically half my life, I’ve grown inured to reports of kid-glove and more overt judeophobia on the part of the “natives”. However, this story managed to shock even me (as it would anybody who is a doctor or ever contemplated becoming one).

The woman, Bertha Klein, had her son, who is American, call the hotline at 11 p.m.

“I’m not coming,” the doctor reportedly tells the son and hung up. When the son calls again, the doctor says: “Send her to Gaza for a few hours, then [her pains will be over: corrected translation, NCT]” According to Joods Actueel, the doctor confirmed the exchange, saying he had an “emotional reaction.”

Health ministry officials were looking into the incident, according to the monthly’s online edition. According to Joods Actueel, the doctor knew the patient was Jewish because of Klein’s son’s American accent.

The family calls a friend, Samuel Markowitz, who is an alderman of the Antwerp district council and a volunteer paramedic. He calls the doctor to confirm the exchange, and also records their conversation.

“It reminds me of what happened in Europe 70 years ago,” Taffel tells Joods Actueel. “I never thought those days would once again be repeated.”[…]

While the ToI generally do due diligence about such stories (unlike some of the Hebrew press), I read the original article (in Dutch) and can confirm the story is not as bad as reported, but worse. For one, the poor woman is 90 years old.

Any doctor in Belgium is supposed to have sworn the Hippocratic Oath . Denying treatment to anyone for any reason other than sound medical judgment or lack of specific expertise (the Oath specifically gives the example of surgery by a non-surgeon) is a direct violation of the Oath.

[Jewish doctors in Israel swear the similar Oath of Assaf the Physician). And no matter how heated the conflict with our neighbors, this oath is taken seriously. Arabs from all over the Middle East — even from countries technically at war with Israel — travel to Israel’s Top Four hospitals for specialist medical treatment. Not to mention countless patients from the West Bank and Gaza that are beyond the help of the local medical facilities.

Even hardened Hamas terrorists for whom a bullet would be too merciful get full and proper medical treatment in hospitals. Why? Because. That. Is. What. A. Fecking. Doctor. Does, No Ifs, No Ands, No Buts. The fact that several Arab patients of the infamous Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein (a medical doctor) testified after the Hebron Massacre that he had saved their lives when they were his patients speaks volumes — not in favor of his character, but about the seriousness with which the Oath is taken.]

I do not care how much this “dokter strontzak” will apologize or grovel to keep his/her job. Nothing less than permanent revocation of medical license is an appropriate punishment in this case. Anybody behaving like he/she did — denying treatment to a 90-year old woman for no other reason than being Jewish — is not worthy of the name “doctor”/”doctor”/”geneesheer” and only sullies the title.

Then again, I happen to feel the same way about any “doctor” committing involuntary euthanasia . — another practice in direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath (not to mention murder statutes)…

[On screen] One Adam Lanza, age 20, shot and killed his mother, and then went to the Connecticut grade school where she taught and gunned down over two dozen more people, 20 of them children. He subsequently took his own life. No manifesto, no suicide note, no obvious motive.

Note that no “assault weapons” were involved: he used two handguns, and left a third weapon (a .223 rifle) unused in the car.

Our hearts and prayers go out to the bereaved and we wish a speedy and full recovery to the wounded.

But also he left a prescient comment: he notes that the surviving brother told authorities the shooter “is autistic or has Asperger syndr0me”, and mentions “Which, of course, will hopefully not demean other people with autism or Asperger’s.”

The comment was prescient, in that the usual airheaded mediots (but I repeat myself) are starting to blame it on, you guessed it, Asperger’s. The pseudonymous “Elise Ronan”, who has two sons with Asperger’s and blogs extensively about it, has some choice comments on her twitter timeline.

Obviously, by the inane “logic” of Piers Morgan, I could “prove” that CNN journalists are likely to go on “Dick Quest” in Central Park with meth in their pockets and ropes tied around their other heads, but let’s get a little more serious.

I would not categorically exclude that she is also on the “autistic spectrum” (which runs left of “neurotypical” from “geek” over “Asperger’s” to autism), for the simple reason that science academia is probably the single most congenial environment for people with ASDs.

Elise reports that on Good Morning America, somebody claimed that people with Asperger’s “lack empathy”. This is a very common misunderstanding among laymen. To use a musical analogy: a person with Asperger’s may be as musical as anybody but is hard of hearing. A person who truly “lacks empathy” would have no concept of music. And yes, I would not want to feed all the musicians who have gotten hard of hearing (including, sadly, my other half). But nobody would seriously argue that Beethoven’s late works were “amusical” because he was stone deaf at the time he wrote them?!

To put it another way (I, sadly, have personal experience in these matters). To a sociopath, other people’s concerns simply do not exist, other than perhaps as potential levers for manipulation for their own benefit. To a narcissist, other people only exist as potential sources of ‘narcissistic supply’ or competitors for same. To an “aspie”, the emotions of others are as real as for a “neurotypical”, but opaque. They have no trouble identifying (with) abstract concerns or specific material needs of others, but have extreme difficulty “reading” the emotions of others, not even at the level a neurotypical is able to. It is like the difference between having trouble reading a book because of poor eyesight, and being utterly uninterested in any book.

– will continue to be called a school shooting, but that is not what it was

murderer known as: a family annihilator
(wants to destroy those they love)
– school was a theater for his massacre because it was his mothers workplace
– but, not direct connection to the school
– the rest of the killing is to get attention
– and, he wants everyone to know, if he is going to die, that everyone knows his name and how upset and how disgruntled he was

Correspondence Committee reports that the CNN pop shrink now has tips for ‘Republicans depressed by the election outcome’. Yes, we have a ‘disorder’ now. Gee, diagnosing refractive political disagreement as a disorder: what could go wrong?

Tell her to look up ‘gaslighting‘, which is what her own employers have been perpetrating on the American public:

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory, perception and sanity. It may simply be the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, or it could be the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.

The term “gaslighting” comes from the play Gas Light and its film adaptations, in which a husband secretly dims the gas lights in the house and, when his wife remarks on it, he claims that she is mistaken. This is done to convince the woman that she cannot trust her own judgment, and so will not be believed if she tries to report other strange things that are genuinely occurring, which the husband wishes to keep secret. The term is now also used in clinical and research literature[…]

On a lighter note (ahem), here is Steely Dan live with “Gaslighting Abbie”:

This rates as the flying pig moment of the day. While the (doctrinaire libertarian, not conservative) Koch Brothers have become the bugbear of the left in general and of the unions in particular, Red State’s Labor Union Report reports a defense of the Georgia-Pacific owners from a very unlikely source: Jon Geenen, VP of the United Steelworkers union.

while he does not defend the Koch brothers’s political positions, these are hardly news, as they have been at this for 40 years (continuing the anti-Communist activism of their father who learned first-hand what Communism was like, trying to run a factory in the former Soviet Union)

their plants are actually highly unionized, they pay their many employees very well, and management and unions have traditionally had a very good relationship

they are among the few major employers in manufacturing that actually choose to create and maintain jobs in the USA rather than outsource them overseas

as the company is privately held and there are no stockholders to frighten, a boycott would be a pointless exercise in self-gratification at best (which, of course, I increasingly suspect to be the true essence of left-liberalism)

Go read the whole thing. Keep in mind, of course, that Geenen represents the dwindling private sector unions, and takes a position at variance with other unions that primarily represent government and quasigovernmental employees. Outside the USA as well their positions are not always in lockstep.

Fox News had a segment on about how restaurants in Hawaii are now proposing to add a 15% surcharge to the bill for Japanese tourist.
You say: “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?” The rationale is: since Japanese tourists don’t tip (tipping is not customary in Japanese restaurants), the customary 15% tip should be added to the bill so the waiters are not cheated out of their money.
While Japanese are of course the most numerous/visible such group, let’s remove the racial component by pointing out the numerous times I’ve had to remind Belgian and Dutch visitors to the USA about tipping. Now the alleged “excessive parsimony” of the Dutch is a common theme of Belgian jokes about them (the Dutch have similar jokes about the Scottish — neither Belgium nor the Netherlands are big on “political correctness”), but neither the Belgians nor the Japanese have a reputation for stinginess. It’s simply a cultural misunderstanding: waiters in Belgium, the Netherlands (and presumably Japan) are salaried employees and restaurant bills in Belgium, for example, typically state “VAT and service included”. If you were to add a 15% “service charge” to a restaurant bill the Belgian would pay it without a second thought. When I explained to Belgian visitors to the USA or Israel that their tips are the income of the waiters, they understood immediately.
It remains to be seen how mainland American tourists would react if Hawaiian restaurants were to add on a blanket 15% “service charge” to all bills. Yet this would, to a naive outside observer, seem to be the obvious solution…

A dogfight in the skies over New Jersey forced a packed airliner to make an emergency landing yesterday.

A 12-pound Manchester terrier — apparently channeling Snoopy’s Red Baron — got loose on a US Airways flight and declared war on the passengers and crew, rampaging down the aisle, biting anybody in her way.

Mandy and her owner, an 89-year-old woman who said she was too embarrassed to be publicly identified, had boarded Flight 522 in Newark for a ride to Phoenix.

The pooch had been in a carrier under her owner’s seat. But when Mandy’s dog tranquilizers wore off, the elderly woman put the carrier on her lap and took her best friend out of it.